2011 Bergström Pinot Noir Shea Vineyard

Fraise du bois and wild cherry; rose petal and brown spices scent the Bergstrom 2011 Pinot Noir Shea Vineyard, with tart-edged, generously juicy red berry fruit following on a palate significantly starched with tannin. There is impressive penetration and persistence here, along with saline and smoked meat savor that sets me salivating, and helps also to assuage the tannins. This should prove fascinating to follow through at least 2022. Josh Bergstrom – for much more about whose history, methods, and vineyard sources consult my Issue 202 report – was among those to comment while showing me his 2011s already in June of last year that he was amazed at how excitingly they were turning out; as well as how different from the 2010s, given the superficial similarity of their gross chemistries. “When I saw and tasted some of the fruit on the sorting table in 2011,” says Bergstrom, “I almost wept. But then something just happened, and the wines came together.” I wasn’t able to elicit from him any hypotheses to explain the character difference between 2010 and 2011 (though others’ hypotheses are canvased in my introduction to this report); but Bergstrom was adamant that severe crop-dropping was essential for 2011 quality, “and even at a ton or a ton-and-a-half per acres and harvesting into the second week of November, we still reached just 13% (natural) alcohol.” He performed only selective and minor chaptalization. Bergstrom continues to put great emphasis on the Willamette potential of Chardonnay and he has become convinced from his time spent working in Burgundy (where he still regularly does stints) that “they pick there for a style, rather than for maximum ripeness; and we need to determine what should be the style of Willamette Chardonnay.” That said, it’s pretty clear from talking with him as well as tasting his wines that Bergstrom takes Burgundy as something of a stylistic model, too, counting on the very different soils in which his vines are rooted to set a Willamette signature on his whites. “As a Willamette grower,” advocates Bergstrom, “you have to look at a great slope and say ‘I’m not going to put just Pinot Noir there, but also some Chardonnay.’ I think experimenting with co-fermentation like in Cote Rotie is a great idea. But for now the amount of Chardonnay we grow is so precious that I have not put any into a Pinot Noir.” Bergstrom likes to emphasize continuity and consistency of winemaking regimen because, as he puts it, “I want the vineyard to be what makes the difference, not what I do to it.” Nonetheless, one of the things he reports having devoted considerable time to in recent years, both with Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, is matching each vineyard to the cooperages he determines to be best suited. (Perhaps not surprisingly, the chosen regimen of white wine barrels reflects those Burgundian coopers responsible for the lion’s share of barriques at the Cote d’Or addresses he most admires.) Bottling times for the different Pinots are another aspect being increasingly varied in an attempt to match them with site. The bottling of Shea, for example, has been moved up, and that of Bergstrom Vineyard delayed. Since I tasted most of the 2010s alongside their corresponding 2011s, I have included brief comments on the former – or even updated tasting notes in instances where they performed significantly differently 13 months after my having recorded the tasting notes published in Issue 202. And incidentally, the 2012 material in barrel here is awesome! Tel. (503) 554-0463